Authentication – Part II, Free lunches are very rare indeed.

A total stranger, talking from behind a screen, promises you that he/she/it (you don’t have ways to know) will perform some service after you reveal sensitive private information about yourself and your financial situation by shouting it in a public place.

Strangely enough, you do as he/she/it says because there is the underlying promise that everything will be perfectly fine, as demonstrated by the millions of daily similar transactions being done by millions of people all over the world. Moreover, everybody agrees that transaction as the one described are the minimum standard of performance required from any protocol for authentication and encryption over public channels such as the internet that pretend to have any chance at success.

When we look at the problem from this angle, we should ask not why there are security breaches, instead how is possible that there are any successful (meaning secure) transactions at all.

The problem of exchanging secure messages over a public channel is relatively easy to solve, since the 1960’s we count with encryption algorithms that gives us a relatively comfortable advantage in the race between coders and hackers. These algorithms are the result of interesting mathematical discoveries. However mathematics discoveries alone cannot prevent people from seeking some advantages through cheating and lying. The Internet was born as a very naive environment in which everybody was trusting and trustworthy, but as soon as valuable information started to be exchanged, mechanisms to avoid misrepresentation needed to be put in place.

This is well known, absolutely secure communications can be had over a public channel provided that there was at some point in time a secure exchange between the parties over a private channel. Thus if I want to communicate with my lawyer with absolute security, I will meet him at his office and exchange a set of encryption keys that we will keep confidential (is in both parties best interest). Next time we need to communicate, we will encrypt the messages using this set of keys, which also ensures the identity of the other party.

Enter W. Diffie and M. Hellman, who develop a secure and very elegant way to exchange a piece of secret information (say an encryption key) over a public channel in which the resident evil eavesdropper (Eve) cannot guess the secret number unless she knows how to solve the discrete logarithm problem (an open problem in mathematics ).
Without a strong authentication however, Eve can succeed by intercepting the communications and impersonate my lawyer to me and myself to my lawyer. This way Eve will end up with two secret keys, one to communicate with me and the other to communicate with my lawyer, and the power to snoop in the conversation or even tamper with it, without raising suspicions (the famous man in the middle attack).

The man in the middle has an upside though, in the case in which Eve is a benign entity that is trusted by the participants in the communication (which do not need to know nor trust each other) she can serve as the Trusted Server and provide authentication and encryption keys to both parties. This exchange can be done in such a way as to keep the Trusted Server powerless to snoop or tamper with the communication (see the Kerberos system)

The infrastructure of authentication most commonly used in the internet (often referred as PKI) is based on certificates, special files that carry public encryption keys and data that identifies and authenticates the owner. These certificates are issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) that (in theory) check the identity of the owner and, though a digital signature scheme embeds its own encryption keys in the certificate.

Certificates are akin to a token in the sense that anybody that has control of the certificate (a computer file) can impersonate the owner. Also certificates are as trustworthy as the CA is. If the procedures used by the CA to authenticate and identify the user are sloppy, the certificate itself is of little value.

About this blog

Data Security and Information Theory are essential to modern life. Far from being the exclusive domain of academics and geeks, the fundamentals and its application are easy to understand for most people.
Here, my modest attempt to bring some of the issues to the public discourse and spread the knowledge to make the internet a safer place for your virtual self.